2009 Notable Education Book, American School Board Journal
The Essential School Board Book highlights effective practices that are common to high-functioning boards around the country—boards that are working successfully with their superintendents and communities to improve teaching and learning.
Amid today’s heightened attention on student achievement, school boards find their responsibilities intensified and transformed. In this age of accountability, all school boards need to consider how best to maintain a focus on student achievement and promote it through district and school policies.
In a highly readable and accessible fashion, the book summarizes research linking school board practices to student achievement. It features stories of sixteen diverse boards around the country—elected and appointed; rural, urban, and suburban—and the policies and procedures they have employed to enhance student achievement. Also included is a resource section for those investigating successful school board policies and practices in more depth.
About the author
Nancy Walser is assistant editor of the award-winning Harvard Education Letter. For more than ten years, she worked as a newspaper journalist, covering education and other beats for many local, regional, and national publications, including States News Service in Washington, D.C., the Quincy Patriot-Ledger, the Boston Globe, and the New York Times. She also authored and published two editions of the Parent’s Guide to Cambridge Schools.In 1999, she was elected to the Cambridge School Committee, and served as a member of the board until 2007. During that time, she also served as secretary-treasurer and vice president of the Massachusetts Association of School Committees (MASC), attending many annual and regional conferences sponsored by the National School Boards Association and MASC.Walser has worked at the Harvard Education Publishing Group (HEPG) since July 2006. She coauthored two recent books in the HEPG’s Spotlight series; Spotlight on Leadership and School Change (Harvard Education Press, 2007) and Spotlight on Student Engagement, Motivation, and Achievement (Harvard Education Press, 2009). Her interview with Ronald Ferguson of the Harvard Achievement Gap Initiative and her story, “R Is for Resilience, ” were both finalists for Distinguished Achievement Awards in 2008 from the Association of Educational Publishers.Walser holds a BA in English from the University of Texas at Austin, and is currently a master’s candidate in the Education Policy and Management Program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She and her husband, Robert Buderi, live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where their two children attend the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School.
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